What I did on my grant

(To Gauleiter Forster)

I bathed with water-oxen in the Ganges,
sky-dived somewhere above Anatolia,
at Ephesus kissed the chapel steps Paul of Tarsus
must have trod: what fun, to spread art’s gospel.
After swimming with luminescent plankton
off the coast of New South Wales
after shimmying with hula dancers on Oahu
(one of whom had even been to Mississippi)
after dodging spears of cannibals in New Guinea
or rowing dugouts in darkness for a wedding
in which I held a splintery torch to night
(or tried my Cantonese before the poets of Shanxi
who sang to me the merits of the Xinjiang poets)
I lugged my trusty, multi-volumed edition
of The Man Without Qualities to the poolside
to read a long, sinuous catalogue of qualities
the man lacked, then asked myself (gingerly)
whether by Vol. 4 he would get them, sensing
for the afternoon at least, the muses had departed.
As Robert Musil’s masterful prose engine
chuffed through qualities the man lacked
I wolfed a blood orange down, and pondered.
Poems gestated internally like uninvited guests,
or slept like babies in bassinets, reluctant still
to open their webbed eyes to the sun.
I was that sun. Later, in some white-washed
cottage topping the Aegean, I would cook up
something very very special in the study.